Well, I thought October was going to be a busy month for reading, but what with one thing and another I didn’t end up getting around to much? Pretty much everything I did read was great, though!
I started the month with The Mermaid’s Madness, the second in Jim C. Hines’ Princess series, which follows Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White on their adventures. This second one was just as good as the first – a fast-paced, super-fun read with some cool worldbuilding and an exciting plot. The relationships between the main trio are wonderfully and thoughtfully written, and I’m really looking forward to reading more of the series.
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness was just as compelling, if a lot darker. Set in a world where all the women have died and all the men can hear one another’s thoughts, it had a lot to say about gender roles and the way men and women relate to each other, as well as having a page-turning adventure plot.
Shadowplay by Laura Lam is the second in the trilogy that began with Pantomime. I really enjoyed Pantomime but I felt that there wasn’t quite enough exploration of the intriguing fantasy setting – Shadowplay definitely picks up the slack there and does some really cool things, while still leaving lots of mysteries to be explored in the third book.
Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho is a terrific collection of Malaysian speculative fiction. Every story is different but one of the things that ties them together is the terrific realness of the characters. There’s also a down-to-earth, wry tone that makes the clashing and merging of the strange and the mundane particularly satisfying.
Now that the nights are drawing in, maybe I’ll get more reading done in November…
